With those lines, Alan Alexander Milne—or A. A. Milne, as he’s more widely known—paid tribute to his most enduring creation, a certain fuzzy brown bear called Winnie-the-Pooh. And what a creation it was. It’s little wonder that the books have eclipsed the rest of Milne’s (quite considerable) pen-and-inking. For me, The Complete Tales of Winnie-the-Pooh—that baby blue hardcover, with the ever-magnificent Ernest Shepard drawings gracing the dust jacket and jumping out from every page to say hi—is much like The Godfather is to the Tom Hanks character in Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail: something that has the answer to everything. In all seriousness, it has to be among the greatest books of all time. And I don’t mean children’s books.